I am creating a new web site for a company that is an authorised distributor for a chemical manufacturer in the water and environment industry. This company's only business is this manufacturer's products. For historical reasons the reseller company was named after a rare dog, rather being chemical or water related, or completely neutral. I am looking into revamping the web site and the company logos and wanted to get some input on what is best practice for logos in general for distributors and also for this particular case.

How much emphasis should one put on the reseller company name and how much on the actual (manufacturer's) product brand name? Let's assume the domain name matches the company name on a .co.uk rather than the manufacturer's brand name on a .co.uk. Could the company name logo be omitted entirely, relying only on the URL and the copyright statement and email address at the bottom of the page to tell you who the site belongs to (if we ignore the About and Legal pages for a moment)? i.e. in order to emphasise more the product brand name logo?

If we do still use a graphical logo for the reseller company name, rather than just omit it, should it be more subtle and smaller than the brand name logo and possibly tucked away on the side? And should the company name logo be descriptive? And if so, descriptive of what? The type of business/industry the company is in or to emphasise the companies values, just something pretty and abstract or to simply match the overall theme of the company name (i.e. dogs) even it it has no relevance to anything else?

I was thinking of something simple with just some kind of custom font with the company name and very little other embelishment, and losing the dog that the site currently has in the company logo. Opinions are currently split on this. Their web site currently has the manufacturer's logo on the top right and their company name logo at the top left. The domain is the same as the company name on a .co.uk (also have the .uk). The company also owns the .co.uk for the manufacturer name domain but only uses it as a redirect currently. The company name is also displayed at the bottom of each page in the copyright statement in small text.

Any thoughts please?

Cheers.

To distill the query down, basically when you have a reseller's web site for one manufacturer's line of products only, where the URL matches the reseller name, do you use two logos or just one? And if two, should the brand/manufacturer logo be more prominent that the reseller company name? If one then presumably then it should be the brand logo not the reseller logo (I thought this might cause confusion if the URL isn't the same as the manufacturer name).

Use whichever one is appropriate. There are no rules. User testing will tell you if you made the right choice.

On 2/8/2021 at 12:59 PM, fisicx said:

Use whichever one is appropriate. There are no rules. User testing will tell you if you made the right choice.

Thanks. Does anyone else have an opinion either way about this?

i would probably treat it similar to e.g. a car dealer e.g. a Toyota dealer would have their logo as the main business logo and a strapline/other text saying authorised dealer for Toyota and the Toyota logo cledarly visibible next to this or top right for example. IMO the distributor logo should have prominence, but the product/service logo of the thing they are distributing should be clearly visible

 

On 2/13/2021 at 11:24 AM, davep said:

i would probably treat it similar to e.g. a car dealer e.g. a Toyota dealer would have their logo as the main business logo and a strapline/other text saying authorised dealer for Toyota and the Toyota logo cledarly visibible next to this or top right for example. IMO the distributor logo should have prominence, but the product/service logo of the thing they are distributing should be clearly visible

 

Thanks for your input!